Brass Man

9

After carefully rereading the instructions in the fading light, Anderson detached the breech clamp, set the lever over to single shots, and cocked the carbine. He then aimed at the sulerbane plant below the nearest butte, squeezed off one shot and, even after firing off five shots, was still surprised at how little smoke the gun emitted. The noise, though also less than that generated by his fusile, was vicious enough. He peered thoughtfully at where the bullet had struck the ground, to the left of the plant. Behind him, he heard Bonehead sigh as it sank down on its belly plates. Tergal raised his handgun and fired twice, knocking off one of the plant’s hard resinous leaves.

‘I think I’m getting the hang of this,’ the boy said smugly.

Anderson removed his helmet and dropped it beside his feet, then turned and stared hard at where his fusile was holstered on Bonehead’s back.

‘I’m overcompensating. I should just follow the instructions and use the sight,’ he said, expecting Tergal to make some sarcastic quip, for this was what the boy had already advised him twice. When no comment was forthcoming, he glanced over to see Tergal staring at him in amazement. With a grimace, Anderson reached up and rubbed his perfectly bald head.

‘Fell out when I was a boy and never grew back,’ he said. ‘My mother said it’s because I think too much.’

‘Oh, right,’ said Tergal, embarrassed.

Anderson raised his weapon and fired again, but again the plant remained untouched.

‘I thought you were going to use the sight?’ Smug again.

‘I did.’

The sleer thudded down next to the plant, a hole perfectly positioned between its extensible antlers. It writhed on the ground, its segments revolving independently, then it separated. Its rear section got up on four legs and attempted to make a break for safety. Anderson put a shot into its raw-looking separation point and it collapsed. He turned to Tergal, allowing himself a sly smile. ‘Now we’ve got something to cook on the fire you’re about to make with all those leaves you just slew.’

Tergal stared back, but Anderson saw that the boy had got the message. He humphed, holstered his weapon and walked over to the sulerbane plant and the dead sleer. Frequently glancing above him for any sign of other creatures, he began collecting thick dry leaves. Meanwhile, Anderson returned to Bonehead, clambered up on the creature’s carapace, and unstrapped his packs from behind the saddle. As Tergal returned with a stack of leaves, Anderson was driving posts into the sand — setting up the perimeter of their camp. While the boy then arranged the leaves around a wax firelighter and ignited that with smoky sulphurous matches, Anderson unreeled wire and secured it to the posts.

‘This won’t be enough,’ said Tergal, gesturing at the small stack of leaves heaped beside the fire.

‘You’re sure to find shed carapace around here—that burns good and slow,’ Anderson replied. It was evident to him now that, though Tergal had been travelling for some time, he had never really camped out in wilds like this. He watched as Tergal retrieved his own pack from Stone, and dropped it by the fire before going off in search of more fuel. By the time the boy returned with old sleer sheddings and more of the thick resinous leaves, Anderson had erected the two wires to make a fence a metre high, though with a gap through which Tergal could re-enter, and was now levering off the head from the front end of the dead sleer with his heavy steel knife.

Securing the wires across the gap, Tergal glanced up at the sky, which was now dark green swirled with the red of interstellar gas clouds. The stars had yet to appear and the first impression was of a ceiling carved of bloodstone. He then reached down to turn on the charge generator standing beside one of the posts.

‘Not yet,’ said Anderson, finally levering the sleer’s head off and pulling it away—dragging out a tangle of intestines. Then reaching inside the cavity with his knife, he cut, grabbed and pulled, and out came the translucent internal belly plate, with other gelatinous organs attached. ‘The batteries are low—only got half a day’s charge.’They had left the roadhouse at midday, and only then had he laid out the solar panel on Bonehead’s carapace, and attached the batteries.

‘They’ll last the night?’Tergal asked.

‘Mostly. Anyway, once a few of the buggers have taken a few belts from the fence they tend not to come back.’

Anderson stood up and, carrying the offal and head of the sleer, walked to the fence and tossed them over it for Bonehead and Stone. Not bothering to attach it below its sensory head, the old sand hog folded out its feeding head, extended it on its second hinged neck to suck down the offal, then knocked the remainder across to Stone, who crunched the sleer’s head like a boiled sweet. They both ate seemingly without much appetite, but then this meat was rather too fresh for their taste.

With the fire burning well, Anderson set up his iron spit and roasted segments of sleer from the meatier tail section. The stars came out and, in the stark shadows of the buttes, the relatives of the two travellers’ dinner came out for their nightly game of murder in the dark. Bonehead and Stone folded their heads and legs away, and sank down onto the sand: two long teardrop domes with saddles still in place. Ogygian was poised on the horizon, glittering in reflected sunlight, and distantly the lights of Golgoth cast an orange glow into the dusty sky.

‘Other worlds have moons,’ said Tergal. ‘I wonder what that’s like.’

Anderson, after chucking onto the fire the carapace from the segment of meat he had just eaten, said, ‘More light at night, but little more beyond that, unless the world itself has oceans.’

‘I wonder what that’s like, too.’

‘Wet, probably.’

Beyond the fence, the movement drew closer, as chitinous bodies scuttled from shadow to shadow. Anderson stood up, walked over to the charge generator, and switched it on. The two of them were laying out their bedrolls when a second-stage sleer came to investigate this attractive cluster of heat sources. Its antlers extended themselves out from its nightmare head like long thin black hands, then touched a wire and jerked back. The creature held its ground for a moment, its feet rattling against the earth and its carapace saws scraping against each other, then with a hiss it retreated.

‘Your first watch?’ Anderson suggested.

Still clutching the gun he had drawn, Tergal eventually nodded. Anderson shook out his blankets, to be sure they had not acquired unwelcome guests, before lying down with his head resting on one of his packs. Through half-closed eyes, he watched Tergal light a smoky candle, and immediately the smell of repellent invaded the air — keeping away smaller denizens that might crawl under the wire. The boy then bowed his head and listened to the sounds of hard limbs rasping against sandy surfaces. Anderson closed his eyes fully and allowed sleep to take him. Tergal would not be robbing anyone tonight—he had other things to occupy his attention.

The first view showed the world only lightly crusted with black, with frequent cracks and volcanic eyes appearing and fading constantly. With his hand inside a projected virtual control, Cormac doubled the magnification, and now saw plumes of gas, ash and magma spewing into the poisonous atmosphere. It was hell—with all the sulphur and fire you could want—but until only a month ago had been lacking in devils. Then two had arrived.

‘Show me the carrier shell,’ he said.

A square appeared, picking out a dot, and the magnification increased to show the wrecked shell poised above the inferno.

Ticking slowly while standing beside Cormac’s chair as if to keep an eye on the virtual control the AI had loaned, Jack’s automaton intoned, ‘Cento urges that we leave him and go at once to the coordinates he has given us. He does have a point. We shall achieve nothing by this rescue that cannot be achieved by the other ships on their way here.’

‘Try to think like a human,’ said Gant, lolling in one of the club chairs.

‘Why should I restrict myself so severely? Cento has told us everything, and logically there is no reason for delay,’ said the ship’s AI.

‘But Cento is still Cento,’ Cormac supplied, and then left Gant to cobble together the explanation he himself could not be bothered trying to verbalize. He just knew it was right to have Cento along with them.

‘Yes, he’s told us everything,’ said Gant. ‘And from what he has told us we know that Skellor will assume Cento was utterly destroyed. That’s an advantage, since in some situations his presence might pause Skellor for half a second, and that could mean the difference between life and death.’

‘The same rules apply to Aphran,’ Cormac added.

‘More advantage might be gained by not wasting hours picking up a Golem android who would be picked up anyway,’ observed Jack.

Cormac relented and explained, ‘It’s about weapons, Jack. In you we have everything we need in the way of bombs and missiles, but that might not be enough.’

‘You’re rationalizing,’ said Jack.

‘Attempting to rationalize something I feel instinctively—and it has been trusting such feelings that has kept me alive, and has made me as successful as I have been.’

‘Granted,’ said Jack.

The sun was a blue boiling giant glimpsed after thaw-up, as the Jack Ketch entered this barren system.

Now it was out of view, for they were approaching in the planet’s shadow so as not to overheat the ship. The carrier shell, since Skellor had hit it with a kinetic missile of some kind, had lost its geostationary position and, as Cento explained, was now orbiting the planet. Over the next hour they drew even closer, and Cormac saw that parts of the shell were still glowing red hot. They reached it just as it was coming back into the sun’s actinic glare and, through niters, Cormac observed grapples—towing braided monofilament cables—fired across from each of the attack ship’s nacelles. Closing by hydraulics these ceramal claws drove sharp fingers into the charred hull. Then came a droning as the Ketch’s engines took up the strain and dragged the shell back into the planetary shadow.

‘I have apprised Cento of our position, and he is now making his way to where I will place the airlock,’ Jack informed them.

Cormac observed the docking tunnel extruding towards the shell. He noted that it was heading towards bare hull, and surmised that this was an injector lock — for inserting troops, probes, war drones, or even poison gas, into a hostile ship. He saw it contact, and the flare around its rim as it cut into the hull.

‘Come on,’ he said to Gant.

As they entered the dropshaft, and it shifted them to their destination, Cormac had to wonder if this was the only shaft the Jack Ketch contained, as he had yet to discover any other. He and Gant moved into a short corridor decorated with metallic Greek statues and with reed matting on the floor. This took them to the chamber preceding an airlock—also lined with statues but with a bare metal floor. Shortly the displays on the exterior touch panels showed that the lock was cycling. Within a minute the inner door whoomphed open. Leaning on one hand, what remained of Cento looked up at them.

‘Touch of bother?’ Gant enquired.

The four guarding the corridor were ensconced behind an APW cannon. Skellor did not even need to scan to know they were in constant communication with their fellows—their terrified expressions told that tale. As he stepped past the cannon—and over the woman crouching down connecting a large energy canister to the weapon—he noted the one over by the wall stare in his direction, his expression puzzled. But then the man returned his attention to the proximity grenade he was setting. Skellor moved on, glad not to have to kill these four, for that would alert Nalen, who was still fleeing towards the runcible.

Past the men, Skellor accelerated to a speed that only Mr Crane or a Polity Golem could match. He wanted to intercept Nalen as soon as possible—did not want him to get within the defences of the runcible Al; did not want that level of confrontation yet. It occurred to him to wonder what the AI’s reaction would be to the commotion behind. Certainly there would be a reaction of some kind.

A dropshaft, disabled, then up the ladder, just touching on the rungs in nil gee, changing course with a hand slapping against the exit portal, bending metal, then into another corridor opening out into an arboretum similar to the one below. Ahead, a gleam in his virtual vision, at the centre of an unstable web of light. In the real world he saw a man spherically fat running as energetically as the two guards alongside him. There was a doubling of image: yes, the man was fat, but scales did not really cover him—that was illusion. Closer, and Skellor began to feel the link that dropped away from this man and this station and out into space. He slammed into Nalen’s back and, looping an arm around the man’s greasy neck, dragged him down the corridor. Slapping the flat of his hand against Nalen’s aug, which appeared utterly fused to his head, he transmitted the virus down penetrating Jain filaments. Nalen began to shriek.

Skellor glanced back and saw the two guards, weapons drawn, staring about themselves in bewilderment, for to their eyes their charge had simply disappeared. Then both of them jerked as, through Nalen, the virus hit their augs. One staggered back against the wall and slid down to the floor, blood bubbling from his ear. The other shrieked, clawed at his aug and managed to tear it from his head like a reptilian scab. Still shrieking he ran towards the sabotaged dropshaft.

No matter—Skellor had control now.

Crane had killed many of them, and many more were fleeing. Gazing through the eyes of those on the run, Skellor saw ECS uniforms. Nalen’s people were going down all around, under fire from riot guns. Golem were bringing down others, and easily securing them in ankle and wrist cuffs. Skellor had not expected ECS to react so quickly. He immediately realized that the AI must have been aware of the Dracocorp network, and been preparing to deal with it. He had very little time.

Nalen’s mind was a gibbering thing that yielded easily to his control, for his aug had softened it to receive commands through the U-space link. Skellor shrugged himself into that mind, as if into someone else’s clothing. Tracing that branch of the network generating outside the station, he was surprised to find, orbiting the red dwarf, a U-space transmitter, and thought that so prosaic. The virus opening the way for him, he soon found himself groping mentally through alien software that was somehow familiar to him, familiar to that alien side of him. He was there; the coordinates were his. Then the communications laser pulse slammed into the transmitter, viral programs propagating from it, and snatching at that last vital information but failing to take it.

Dropping Nalen, Skellor staggered back. It was suddenly all so horribly clear to him. In his arrogance, he had assumed the Polity would not try this route, so busy were they tracing Dragon through Dracocorp. How very stupid he had been.

Crane, back to the ship—fast.

He sensed the Golem’s immediate response just before the viral probe came in through a biotech aug on the other side of the station, opening the way, and something utterly vicious snarled its way into the network he now controlled. This he had encountered before: a hunter-killer AI program had been poised to take this network at its moment of maturity. He himself had taken it perhaps only months away from that time. ECS must have known about Nalen and his people for a long time, but had given them sufficient leash to get a lead on one of the Dragon spheres. Skellor, as he staggered away from the fat man who now seemed to have deflated on the floor, felt real fear.

What are you? was the essence of the program’s question as it swung towards him in the network. Skellor ran for the dropshaft and leapt into it.

Located.

The dropshaft came on and tried to kill him, slamming immediately to a constant four gees. He reached out and caught the lip of the floor below, the force with which his arms hit buckling the floor plates, the composite out of which his bones were now fashioned bending and splintering. In the subliminal flash of agony, his defence lost coherence and a viral spear tried to impale his mind. He took it and slid aside, leaving another mind to take the brunt. Grav in the dropshaft abruptly reversed, slamming him up against the upper rim of the exit portal. The sound of Nalen’s impaled mind dying was a retreating piggish squeal. Bonding his hands against the ceiling with Jain filaments, Skellor dragged himself out of the shaft’s gravity field and dropped to the floor. Hitting, he accelerated as fast as he could, feeling the floor plates fluxing behind him as the program compensated for his inhuman speed. Then one went nil below him, and the next soared up to four gees. He came down on one knee and one foot, kneecap taking the brunt and shattering, but got no reaction from the human nervous system he had disconnected from cerebral activity. This battle worked both ways, however: Skellor linked back, through the probe into the Dracocorp network, and let that take all the pain his human body felt as it shattered and rebuilt. With a gargantuan hiss something retracted, and all the gravplates in the corridor returned to one gee.

Feel pain, do you? he asked of the shapeless nightmare.

He was in the arboretum now, retracing his course — dodging between ECS troops and Golem alike, with his ‘ware still functioning.

How about this?

Still linked to his attacker, he reached out to all those still-conscious points in the network. Slammed into their aug control programs and gave them something he had himself recorded on the Occam Razor while he had tortured the Separatist woman, Aphran. The hoarse voice of agony echoed throughout the station as, one after the other, people wearing biotech augs fell, believing someone was peeling off their skins with red-hot scalpels. For a moment Skellor thought the feedback into the attacking program was killing it, but then he saw that the program was changing to link into the screamers and give them succour. So altruistic were Polity AIs, so kind to the poor soft-bodied creatures, that Skellor and Crane both broke apart like ripe fruit.

Skellor, we have ever let humans deal with human threats, Ruby Eye told him, but in your case we may make an exception. Go away from here now—a battle between us would denude this station of life, and I see no purpose in that when we can kill you somewhere more remote.

Crane awaited him on the Vulture. The Golem was now seated playing with new toys. Skellor ignored him and, through the Jain structures he had grown inside the ship, immediately put all systems online.

Runcible AI. If you fire any weapons on me, I’ll turn this ship round and fly it into your station, initiating U-space jump before the engines are ready. I don’t suppose even you would survive that.

Go away, creature.

With a blast of fusion flame, he accelerated the Vulture down from the station towards the red dwarf, initiating the ship’s newly installed chameleonware. He knew that, in this situation, hiding was not enough, as the AI knew where the Vulture had been docked, and could fill nearby space with lethal munitions and a cage of discharges from energy weapons. But there came nothing from the station: no missiles, no laser beams, not even a parting taunt as he dropped the little ship into U-space. And somehow that was more frightening.

No matter how much shielding a ship used, passengers always felt the transition from U-space to realspace—or the reverse. Why this was so, no one had explained, though Mika felt sure some would attribute it to the belief that humans were more than mere material substance—an idea she found objectionable. Climbing out of her bed in the quarters Jerusalem had recently provided for her, she gazed up at a screen that was always set for external view, and observed starlit space rather than any planetary system. The Jerusalem was no longer in U-space.

‘Jerusalem, what’s happening?’ she asked.

There was a pause before the AI replied, ‘So it begins.’

‘Pardon.’

‘We will not be going to Masada. We will now be going to a sector of space in which the source of so much of what we study has been located.’

‘Skellor’s been found.’

‘Not precisely, but we may close him in our grasp.’

Abruptly Mika felt that sensation of transition again and, looking up, saw her screen showing the bland grey representation of U-space. Normally, while a ship was under, its human passengers and crew would go into cold sleep, but aboard the Jerusalem there was an urgency to learn all about that thing that might kill the Polity. Having slept four hours, which was ample for Mika, she showered, dressed, and immediately went out into the main corridor and headed for the refectory. Though machines in her own quarters could supply all her nutritional needs, she always took her meals elsewhere. In the refectory, like-minded people bounced ideas about and did quite a lot of the planning and more imaginative work there. Entering the large room, with its scattering of tables and chairs, she saw that Susan James, D’nissan and Prator Colver were all seated around one table and, after making her selection from one of the food dispensers, Mika collected her tray and went over to join them.

The man, Colver, was Life-coven like herself: a stocky ginger-haired individual who was prone to sudden enthusiasms and who had long ago learned how to ask questions. ‘Have you heard?’ he asked as she sat down. ‘We’re going to Ruby Eye.’

Mika looked across at Susan James and raised an eyebrow.

‘It’s a research station in orbit around a red dwarf. Been there for fifty years—long-term study,’ she explained.

Susan was a standard-format human; in appearance almost a female version of Ian Cormac, though certainly not as deadly. Mika turned her attention to D’nissan, the low-temperature ophidapt man from Ganymede. His visor was down in the neck ring of his hotsuit, and he was drinking what looked like a raspberry coolie through a straw—a drink that would have been hot to him. His pronouncements were usually concise and apposite, which was why, when the situation warranted it, he was Jerusalem’s chief researcher, but he didn’t have anything to say just then.

‘To get Skellor,’ Mika said.

‘It’d be great to get hold of the source of the Jain tech we’ve been studying,’ said Colver. ‘I’m sure there are controlling mechanisms we haven’t seen yet.’

Now D’nissan observed coolly, ‘That’s like studying venom, then wishing to get hold of a snake.’

Mika thought that a bit rich, coming from a man with diamond-scaled skin and fangs.

He looked at her directly. ‘Of course we haven’t seen it all, because what we have got is just a… cutting. If it were rooted and allowed to grow, we then perhaps would.’

‘Yeah, but Skellor… he direct-interfaced with a crystal matrix AI…’ said Colver, apropos of nothing.

‘I would like to see Jain technology operating,’ said Mika.

‘Haven’t you heard?’ Colver asked, interrupting D’nissan, who had been about to speak. ‘We’re going to see that.’

Mika stared at D’nissan.

‘The asteroid,’ he explained, ‘it would have had to be destroyed by imploder anyway. So why not use it to grow some of our specimen?’

‘In red sunlight,’ Mika suggested.

‘Precisely,’ said D’nissan.

Mika was not sure how to react. This was what she had wanted, but she was also aware that they were playing with something substantially more dangerous than fire.

In the invisible grid, Crane shifted a blue acorn to a position adjacent to the lion’s tooth, then moved the coin ring adjacent to the piece of crystal. The rubber dog remained constant beside the laser lighter. This elicited a fragmented image of the same grid occupied by the shells of penny oysters, the interstices of which dying pearl crabs were exploring. Blood dripped from his fingers onto the crushed-shell beach, black in the silver moonlight.

‘Did they all get in his way?’ Angelina asked, looking at the corpses scattered across the sand.

‘Apparently so,’ said Arian. Three of his men moved ahead, spreading out as they stepped into the creosote bushes, while the other eight split into two groups of four, to head in either direction along the beach.

‘Two more here,’ said one of the men, pushing aside a bush with the barrel of his pulse-rifle. Angelina moved up beside Arian as her brother gazed down at the mess. The tangle of blood, bones and torn flesh seemed only identifiable as human because there was clothing mixed in there as well.

‘Two?’ she asked.

‘Well I count two heads,’ the man replied.

Angelina did not like this at all. With Alston dead they could have just moved in and taken over his operation, perhaps having to pay the man’s people over the odds for a while until they got things under control. But there had been no reaction to their approach of the island. The scanners aboard the boat had detected very few heat signatures, and those few detected were fading. It was beginning to look as if no operation remained here.

They moved on through silvery moonlight, and it was only fifty metres inland before they found the next corpse. This man was impaled on the snapped branch of a tree, his feet dangling two metres from the ground, where his blood had pooled.

‘Where exactly is he?’ Angelina asked. ‘We wouldn’t want him to make a mistake about us.’

‘On the other side of the island, on the beach. He’s not moving and all I’m getting is “objective achieved” and some weird images. He won’t move.’

‘Perhaps we should just turn around and leave him here?’

Arian lowered his hand from his platinum aug and stared at her. ‘I think it may be the second link to his control module from my aug. We need a direct optic link to get the bandwidth, and some military programming. Someone like Sylac could do the job.’

Angelina could hear the doubt in his voice. Personally she had no wish to see herself, or her brother, under Sylac’s knives, since the surgery he performed might not render the intended result. The surgeon was a law unto himself and considered the human body a testing ground, or even a playground. Nor did she want either of them to be more closely connected to the scrambled insane mind of the Golem, no matter how much more control they might thus obtain. And the idea of putting that kind of power into the hands of one of their employees would be sheer madness. Already she was beginning to see that Mr Crane was like a black-market pulse-gun from one of the less reputable dealers on Huma—it might work, but was just as likely to blow up in your face. When she saw the mound, she felt her thoughts confirmed.

‘Why the fuck did he do that?’ asked Arian.

Counting heads, they found the knotted mound of corpses consisted of maybe eight people—it was difficult to be sure. Stepping closer to see if she recognized any of the faces, Angelina felt her foot sink, and abruptly stepped back. Her boot pulled out with a slurp, and she saw that the blood had turned the ground into a quagmire. She had killed, she had seen horrible death, and been hard and unaffected by it. But this made her gorge rise. One of their men stepped off to one side, leant against a rock, and spewed briefly before turning back.

‘Up to his house?’ he asked, after wiping vomit from his lips.

‘Yes… to his house,’ Arian replied. Abruptly he reached up and initiated the comunit button on his collar. ‘Falen, Balsh—don’t go round to the other side of the island. Just get back to the boat.’ He tilted his head as he listened to their reply, then said. ‘You needn’t bother—I don’t think there’s anyone left alive here.’

In the moonlight the corpses on the hillside were macabre sculptures: clawed hands frozen while groping for mercy, jags of white bone pointing to the sky, and an eyeless head propped on a rock, gazing into infinity. More of the same occupied Alston’s fortified home, but what struck Angelina more than anything was the lack of pulse-gun burns on the walls. The slaughter here had been quick and absolute. She was also surprised at just how intact Alston himself was, sitting behind his desk there with something gleaming in his mouth.

‘No one else must get their hands on him,’ said Arian, staring at the corpse.

Angelina realized her brother was referring to the Golem.

‘We’ll just hide him away somewhere secure, just… keep him ready.’

So, Arian was beginning to see straight.

‘It’s not like we’ll need him for every operation.’

Angelina kept her mouth closed and her face expressionless.

‘We can handle most problems ourselves.’

‘Where do we put him?’ Angelina asked him.

‘Where such things should always be kept,’ Arian told her. ‘In a cellar.’

‘Yes, of course.’

Angelina would have preferred that place to be the caldera of a volcano.